Doctors, disease and James Joyce

The Irish author James Joyce is regarded as the greatest modernist writer of his time. His works, notably The Dead, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake - are intensely autobiographic including meticulous descriptions of illness and states of health - no surprise in view of Joyce's medical history and hypochondria. The Dead revolves around the tragic love of a doomed tubercular youth. Ulysses has a graphic description of Mary Joyce's death, a funeral and a birth; Stephen Dedalus, the character based on Joyce, attends a drinking session with medical students at the lying-in hospital just as Joyce had done as a student; references to syphilis, alcoholism and other illnesses abound. (author abstract)